No we were booing because the ref was not consistent in his application of the rules. I have no problem with the penalties he gave, my problem was he only penalised Bradford and allowed Saints to dominate even more. Debatable whether it would have affected the end result with our defence the way it was, but that doesn't mean we cant query the referee's performance. It was one of the worst performances from a referee I have seen for a long time. Even the Saints fan behind me in the pop stand was agreeing that at times Saints were worse than Bradford yet Bradford were penalised.

But even when we did win the collision all Roby did was tell us to get up and allow Saints to wrestle on the ground. Saints did not win every collision for every tackle in the opening 35 mins. There is no way on earth Saints would have been allowed to wrestle like that with Ganson Silverwood or most of the other refs in charge.

You say wrestling is part of the game, they must have changed the rules for the Hull v.s Warrington game then.

I don't think anyone has said Saints weren't the better side - they were by a country mile and in all departments, but it doesn't alter the fact they got away with constantly holding down whilst we were continually 'pinged' for it; it was one-eyed refereeing of the worst order, imo.

I think I've put elsewhere that Roby is new and may well go on to become a good referee over time, but I sincerely hope we don't see him again until he is.

Saints dominated the collision so got quicker PTBs when they had the ball. When we had the ball we often got dominated by the Saints defence so it was a slower PTB. Many of the penalties at the PTB were because we were trying to slow it down on the ground. Once we fell into that spiral we expended a lot of energy and the defence got pulled apart.

My problem with the ref was his inconsistent interpretation of things like offside and hands on the ball at the PTB. These seemed to be made at random and just broke up the pattern of play making it a pretty awful spectacle. He almost seemed to look as if he had to justify his existence on the field by constantly blowing up. I thought he was too keen on the technical stuff at times and dug a hole for himself and got whistle happy.

I hope we don't get him again soon. I hope he's kept clear of any big showpiece games too.

Yep. As i said, when within 30 minutes the ref is the person dominating the whole game, and at the centre of attention, then even he must concede he's making an utter porridge of it.

Or is that porage?

I think that's a good summary. To be honest in the first half he could justifiably have penalised us at nearly every tackle. After his initial period of zero tolerance, which obviously only affected us, he seemed to decide that he needed to cut back on the pens and started to even things out.

The way refs officiate the ptb these days, if you get a combination of a fussy ref and one very physically dominant team it tends to end up one sided.